Election night in Flathead County is a singular experience. As a reporter and political nerd tasked with covering election results – and by my rough calculations I’ve covered six in the valley so far – it has the vaguely exciting feel of childhood holidays: You’re excited about something; you’re not sure why, but at the end of it all you can at least be certain the uncertainty will resolve itself. And you’ll probably over-eat and stay up too late.
But this year I came away from election night with two broad observations, that are somewhat related. (After all, it wouldn’t be a post-election column without an explanation, based merely upon anecdotal evidence, of what the results mean.)
It’s the nature of news that you hear about the bad stuff more often than the good stuff. The terrible car accident on a stretch of road gets reported; the other 364 days a year that people drive safely on that route doesn’t. Similarly, you only hear about the Flathead County Election Department when there’s a mistake or delay. The rest of the time, their planning, courtesy, patience and deep sense of responsibility goes unnoticed. But those qualities were in evidence last Tuesday, as yet another Flathead County election went off like clockwork.
Reporters begin to show up on the second floor of the old county courthouse building around 8 p.m., just as the polls close and usually about a half-hour before the first results are released. The gaggle of radio, TV and print journalists kill time by speculating on the races likely to be close, reminiscing about past election night debacles and wondering why we didn’t order a pizza.
Eventually, an election official warily makes their way to the copy machine with the first round of results, and the reporters swarm, desperate for an initial glimpse of how the night will go, of where the drama will be.
And yet, this is Montana. We don’t shove. We say thank you. We pass the stapler. The reporter closest to the copy machine passes out the packets to the rookies before calling in the results to their own newsroom. If someone has a question about the number of precincts, or percentages, one of their competitors attempts to help. And then we get out of the election officials’ way so they can keep working.
Officers with the Flathead County Sheriff’s Posse are stationed at the doors of the courthouse building as a precautionary measure, but they’re just as eager as anybody else to learn how the results are trending. And this is a small enough town, the reporters know many of them anyway. We discuss what voters are doing in the valley, and the incoming results of some of the big races around the country.
The final precincts trickle in close to midnight, and in the Flathead, as across the country, Republicans fared well. This year I called in county results to the Associated Press, and at the end of the night, I had to fax them the final tally. Though I’m sure she would have rather turned out the lights and headed home, Election Administrator Paula Robinson stayed late to help a finicky fax machine send the pages for me.
I share these anecdotes because I can’t help but think how unpleasant these election night marathons could be, and aren’t, because everyone involved maintains civility, perspective and a sense of humor. We all have a job to do and we do our best to ensure those jobs get done. Relationships between reporters and government officials aren’t always friendly, nor should they be, but they are rarely unnecessarily ugly – in this valley anyway.
So as a newly minted crop of legislators heads to Helena in two months, I wonder if voters don’t want the same thing from the state government: some civility, a broad perspective and maybe even a sense of humor about the passions that will inevitably flare. But most of all, I think voters want some stability and functionality.
I don’t think this is the year to radically alter the funding mechanism or level of major public needs like, say, schools. Some funding cuts look inevitable, but as Montanans dig themselves out of the recession, the more predictable and quietly efficient the government can be, the better. These days there’s already enough unpleasantness and uncertainty in just about every other aspect of daily life that Helena doesn’t need to add to it.